Recently I had a "falling out" with DreamHost. I had their downtime and everything everyone else experiences, and I was ok with that. I could look past the small problems and love DreamHost for the good things it offered. The good cheap things(Shared Hosting).

I was running a small video blog(externally hosted videos) with WordPress as my street pimp. Everything was going great. It started out slow, as most sites do, but I was really happy to be seeing 1.5-5K unique hits daily. This went on for a good 2 months lovely. I was very satisfied. Well one day I became "Mr Big" and hit 12K in about 10 hours. DreamHost quickly turned my account off, as I was affecting the other sites on the server that I shared. Understandable. Well they eventually referred me to their VPS (dreamhostps.com)and I quickly signed up, thinking I had just solved all my problems.

Haha, what a lying **** she turned out to be. Promising me love and compassion, but only bringing deceit and pain. Spending an extra $25/mo(250 MB/250 MHz guaranteed) I thought I was golden.Now I cant get 50 uniques an hour without getting a Internal Server Error. WHY DREAMHOST?! WHY MUST YOU HATE ME??

Im currently looking to get away from DH. I cant stand these problems. I need something that can withstand 15K unique hits on a mildly modified WP site serving external videos. What are my options?

I guess I should also include my budget... which isnt much at all. Im not going above $50/mo, but would love to get something around $35-45.

I spent an afternoon completely away from computers, and when I got back, I received this email from the Dreamhost Security Bot:-----

We have noticed your myacct user causing a large amount of load on the webserver. We also noticed that domains under this user are running outdated web software that may be hackable. Often times when domains get hacked the hackers will launch malicious processes that use a great deal of CPU time and thus increase the load on the machine caused by your user. This does not necessarily mean that your sites are hacked, but they could be. To ensure that your user is not compromised and contributing to server load unnecessarily (and, also not engaging in illegal activity typically associated with these types of hacks) we ask that you review the following and act accordingly.

1) Update all pre-packaged web software to the most recent versions available from the vendor. The following site can help you determine if you're running a vulnerable version:[url]

Joomla (v1.5.8) : /home/myacct/disabled site.net/ (OUTDATED!)

I disabled this site six months ago.

Joomla (v1.5.12) : /home/myacct/joomla1512site.com/ (OUTDATED!)

There were three of these

WordPress (v2.8.4) : /home/myacct/wp284site.org/ (OUTDATED!)

There were six of these

- WordPress installations need to be updated to the current release of 2.8.5.

- Joomla installations need to be updated to the respective current secure release: 1.0.15 or 1.5.14.

- Any old/outdated/archive installations that you do not intend to maintain need to be deleted from the server.

The (OUTDATED!) domains above have been disabled by renaming the domain directory to end in "_DISABLED_FOR_POSSIBLE_EXPLOIT__CONTACT_DREAMHOST". Please do not reinstate them until you are ready to immediately upgrade them, or until you have already upgraded them.-----

So, nine of my sites were disabled, for a period of four hours, with NO ADVANCE WARNING from Dreamhost.

I send them a response, pointing out that:

1. I run a tripwire program, integrit, on a daily basis. It showed no evidence that any of these sites had been hacked.

2. My access logs showed no increase in activity on this date.

They wrote, "We have noticed your myacct user causing a large amount of load on the webserver." Well, I certainly would like some details on this, but I haven't received any.

Here's part of the response I got:-----

In the case of some of the domains that were disabled your softwares wereyears out-of-date.------

no. Wordpress 2.8.4 was released August 12, 2009. Joomla 1.5.12 was released July 1, 2009. The only software that was "years" out of date was on two sites that had been disabled by me six months ago.

It's clear that these people are making things up as they go along. All they really had to do was send me a note saying, "Hey, Bob, could you update these Wordpress and Joomla sites sometime in the next few days?"

it says domain is already in system. it seems the previous guy was hosting it on dreamhost.basically they said I can't host this domain, and that i have to pay extra to have it added. anyway to circumvent this?

I've been a DreamHost customer for a few years now. I like to remain loyal to one brand, but I just can't stand DreamHost's down times (My website is down as I am writing this). I enjoy their cpanel a lot, and I was wondering if anyone can suggest me a few alternatives. I am currently on shared hosting with over 10+ domains. I read about, ANHosting, BlueHost, and HostGator. I want something fast, and I might even settle for a cheap VPS. However, I don't know how much resources do I use, so we will have to work out the details if I choose a VPS.

My account which was hosted for over a year with DreamHost has been disabled on 25th November without any prior notice or reasonable explanation. They only said:

----Your account has been disabled for Terms of Service violations.

Specifically, the clause you violated is:

Customer agrees to not engage in activities pertaining to Black Hat SEO, Spamdexing, and so-called "Scraper sites." These can all have a severely detrimental effect on server performance and are not permitted. You must find hosting elsewhere. We will not re-enable your account under any circumstances.

Terri H----I swear I have never engaged in such activities. I asked them to clarify the action and tell me the problem domain. But they told me nothing about that. Even if I did such things (I swear I didn't), do they have a right to prevent my access to my files and databases? How can I move to a new host without these data?

I have multiple domains on my account and 2 of them is very important to me. One of them have 9000 unique hits per day and brings a good adsense income. I cannot rebuild these websites because they are products of two years effort.

Now I'm begging them to let me access my files and mysql databases but they do not answer my tickets and emails. I lost my bearings and don't know what to do!

I was disturbed by a posting on DreamHosts blog. I try to stay current on hosting news and sometimes it involves looking at others Blogs. This example is not NOT to treat a customer

[url]

Even though the customer contacted the wrong department, this is NOT the way to handle these issues. I have personally received calls on my personal cell phone because they found it on one of the domains I own (whois I assume). I still take the call and work with the customer to resolve. I will never even think about doing this. Your Thoughts?

I write to them and they said they can move my 1 website to another apache, they think maybe problems on apache. BUT after they moved sucessfull, my website is not reachable! and said: bad http-conff etc.

These days are very bad experience with them, today i found they start their unlimited ALL hositng package, i am not sure if this is related with my website was slow.

Acturally, I do not need so big and traffic hosting on DH, i rather to choose a good performance and speed hosting, NOT a oversell hosting company!

I must say: i feel it is ok in past years, but recent i am not happy with their hosting service.

My question: Is there a better hosting company than dreamhost? i need 10g spaces,200-400gb month traffic,can host 3-5 domains.

I signed up a Dreamhost account, and just "to see", I entered my account with my terminal. I access the /home directory and found that there's a symlink for each user that links to a directory under a hidden directory, I don't know why, but each account is located under something like this:

Code:

/home/.pluto/johnsmithblog

So basically you can find out easily who's hosted with you, just try accessing johnsmithblog.com and see if it's matching. Then you find out that a fair amount of the users hosted on the server use popular CMS/blog/forum software, ie: Wordpress. The only thing you have to do is create a PHP script with two lines of code: an include that points to the database config file (follow the same default structure of the CMS source tree used) a print function to display each variable or constant used to access the database This simple. Then, access http://mysql.johnsmithblog.com, when you're prompted for username/password, just type the database information and you have cracked the web site. How is it possible to be that simple?

This is just a note to let you know your DreamHost account has beendisabled for violation of our Terms of Service listed here:

http://www.dreamhost.com/tos.html

Specifically, section 8 of Material Products, "Customer agrees to notengage in activities pertaining to Black Hat SEO, Spamdexing, and so-called "Scraper sites." These can all have a severely detrimentaleffect on server performance and are not permitted."

As such, we have now closed your account effective immediately andrefunded all your money. It should show back up on your credit cardwithin 3-4 busines days.

Please do not attempt to sign up for service with DreamHost again inthe future.

I started a small site on their cheapest shared hosting. Well, it got pretty big and one day blew up. I got 12,000 unique visits(30K actual visits) within about 10 hours. The load this put on the shared server was bogging down everyone who was also on the server. DreamHost disabled my site until the load went down. Thats fine by me, its shared hosting and I was affecting other people. Would have been awesome if DH would have TOLD ME that they disabled my site. I realized the next day my site was offline. Everything within the Control Panel looked fine, I couldnt figure out wtf was wrong. So I send in a support e-mail and Im promptly replied with a generic automated message telling me Ill be helped shortly. About 30 hours later Im finally told my site was put offline due to the suddenly large amount of resources it was taking.

They refused to turn my site back on until I made my coding more efficient. Even after I reassured them that there wouldnt be that many visitors anymore, as the 2 days offline pretty much guaranteed to kill over half my traffic. Nope, I still had to change the site.

Whatever, I made it more efficent, used a cache so it wasnt pulling the page from a DB every time it was visited. Were now at three and a half days offline, awesome.

They still dont believe this is efficient enough. I switch to their VPS service and this satisfied them. They agree to turn the site back on now. 5 days offline. Im getting maybe 100 unique visits at this time.

After about 10 days of their VPS service(WOW their VPS blows donkey balls) I send an e-mail to have it cancelled and just go back to shared hosting. "As your site requires a lot of resources, your cancellation has been denied." At this point Im pretty irritated. My reply is "No offense, but thats wasnt a request. Ive moved to JaguarPC(you guys rock!) VPS service and I would like to go back to my shared hosting. I thank you in advance for doing this for me."

2 days later they say its switched. Oh yea. BTW, you pay daily for the VPS. It just adds on to your shared hosting costs, and yes I had to pay for those 2 days.

Skip ahead 2 months. I get an e-mail saying Ive been billed from DreamHost. This is normal, as my $10 shared hosting account is still active. Only this bill is for $80. Ive just been charged for 2 months worth of VPS and 2 months of shared hosting out of nowhere.

After about 6 e-mails(and 3 days) to their support team Ive finally got a response from a real person, only to tell me that hes forwarding my email to another tech support person that can "better help me". Whatever, do what you do DreamHost. Were now at a week(and 4 more emails asking whats going on, etc) when I get another response. Hey, my problem has been forwarded again. SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET.

So, two weeks later, I finally get my refund with a "We apologize for any inconvenience." e-mail.

They are down again. All of my sites are down (domains not resolving) because of their DNS slowness problem right now: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2009/02/25/dns-slownesslookup-failures/I wanted to stay with them because I'm currently earning like around $100 per month from the referral programs - sly of them in this way to lock and keep us with them, but I can't let these happen again, ruining my online business. They are generally a good web hosting company but down times again and again?!

I need a few good dreamhost substitutes, industry renowned companies preferred:

Budget: under $20, sharedStorage & Transfer: no less than 1 / 8 of what DH is currently offeringLoved slicehost.com, just I'm not quite server oriented. They are not managed right?

Check this out... I was just diggin around in my Dreamhost panel and discovered something new that I've not even seen announced anywhere... Dreamhost is giving a BACKUPS user on each account, totally separately from the web user. You are allowed... well, I'll just copy / paste straight from the panel:

At DreamHost, you may only keep website-related content on your regular users. You do, however, get one user per account where anything legal may be stored; your Backups User.

This user cannot have any websites pointed to it, nor may you share files via it... it is only to be used as an off-site backup for your personal files. As such, we keep no backups of files on this account. These are already supposed to be your backups... not your only copy! (Of course, you should always keep your own copies of all data stored with us.. we make no guarantees!)

Every full DreamHost Hosting plan includes 50GB of backups space! (Additional usage will be charged at the rate of 10 cents / GB a month: the best backup deal on the net!)

Pretty interesting... they didn't HAVE to do that, it's just another one of those things that they give in order to be even MORE awesome, evidently.

I'm having trouble with dreamhost at the moment. From 7pm PST my site was down and it is till now which is 10 hours and i'm losing money

I've message them 4 time throught the support email thing but they haven't replied.

the problem i'm having with my website strange, i get this error message

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

but if i press refresh it does the job, some of the content inside work but some does and it will give you that text again. Anyone suggest what is the reason for this? My other friend who are hosted with dreamhost are fine but accept me. maybe it's on a differnet server that's why but if my site is down i'm expecting to lose around 300usd .

I have been using DreamHost for several years and for the most part it has been a good experience. The price is cheap, you can host an unlimited number of sites, and I have not experienced much downtime.

But now that I am hosting a lot of sites based on WordPress, server performance has become an issue. It can take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds for a site to appear in a browser. In comparison, the static HTML sites that I crank out in Dreamweaver pop up almost instantly.

I have done some research on companies offering virtual web servers and it appears that a lot of people like SliceHost. I am aware that I will now have to administer my own web server and no longer have the benefit of using c-panel. This doesn't scare me as I have been playing around with Linux and Apache since RedHat 4.0 and now use Ubuntu at work.

Before I sign up for a $20/monthly account at SliceHost, I am wondering if I will notice a significant performance difference between them and DreamHost? Has anyone on this forum ever made this switch and if so, did they think it was worth it?

Right now, I have about 25 domains on my DreamHost account that I will be moving over. About 12 of them are WordPress and I plan to eventually convert the remaining static sites over to either WordPress or Joomla. I also have about 12 sites on BlueHost that I would like to eventually transfer to the virtual hosting plan as well. So I will eventually be hosting about 40 sites. (As a side note, it seems that BlueHost's servers have a slight performance edge over DreamHost. But it doesn't seem to be that great.)

Obviously, the ultimate solution would be to get my own server at a co-location place like RackSpace, but right now, I don't want to spend the additional $$$ and want to become a better website admin before I make this jump.

I'm thinking of finding a webhost in US. I knew these hosting company - Bluehost, Dreamhost, Hostgator are the famous one. They are offering quite similar package as well.

No sure which to choose.

Usage: just normal wordpress blog with a lot of photos. Might want to have my own photo gallery in the hosting server as well. Must have Fantastico Deluxe and must be in cpanel. lol.. I'm used to cpanel.

I hadn't seen a review for Dreamhost lately so I thought I write about my experiences with them.

I originally registered for Dreamhost in April '07, on their "Crazy Domain Insane" Plan (I prepaid for a full year for $29.40!):Disk Storage: 200GB (Grows 2GB/week)Monthly Bandwidth: 2TB (Grows 40GB/week)Unlimited Domains, MySQL Databases, and FTP AccountsPHP 4 and 5Perl SupportPython SupportRuby on RailsEnhanced Web SecurityOne-Click Installs (Wordpress, Zen Cart, etc.)

Setup was a breeze and everything was up and running within minutes. I setup my domains with the Dreamhost Nameservers, and the DNS changes began to propagate. For the first 6-8 months I had no problems, my sites responded quickly, and the few times I had to contact support the were very helpful and quick to respond (subdomain DNS issues for one of my sites).

Then right after christmas they had the big billing fiasco (read: [utl], and I ended up getting charged for another full year of hosting (resolved within the next day or two).

Well April rolled around again and I decided to renew my account as I had relatively few issues and didn't want to deal with moving all of my sites to a new host. I was hoping to renew my account and use a coupon like I had the first time around, but Dreamhost no longer offers my plan (they only have a 1 size fits all plan now). I bit the bullet and renewed my plan for another year to lower the price to $120 ($10/month), and I was off on another year of Dreamhost.

Right around this time I had also started to move some of my client sites over to Dreamhost, and we started having more and more issues (DNS, slow response times, slow connections). I also experienced an outage or two with no warning from Dreamhost (supposedly planned).

Dreamhost has a status blog available at: [url] where you can read about the latest status updates, problems, follow up, etc. And I've found it helpful in the past to go here to get my updates (Dreamhost doesn't like to send email updates or alerts when they are making changes), but trying to explain this problems to my clients when I don't even get a heads-up from Dreamhost is a real pain.

Fast forward to August, and I am experiencing MySQL outages and slow slow slow connections/queries, as well as network troubles with Dreamhosts' bandwidth provider. Support has been reasonably quick to respond (telling me they're working on it), and the Status blog has some information as to what's been happening, but I think it's time for me to move on.

So in conclusion, you get what you pay for (and in Dreamhosts' case, that's a cheap shared hosting account). In fact, if I didn't rely so much on sites with MySQL (Wordpress/Zen Cart/vBulletin/etc.), I would probably stay with Dreamhost, as I have found their servers to be rather speedy and not overloaded/oversold (at least on the CPU side of things, not their MySQL servers).

I hosted three domains in dreamhost for at least two years. Several days ago, some guy (registered in one of my websites) complained to dreamhost that I was sending a spam email to him and then Dreamhost disabled my account. I don't even have access to my data now.

The email I sent to that guy was just a regular newsletter of my website. The dreamhost staff Karl said that I should provide proof that users of my website should have confirmation on their registration and I should record their registration IP as well as registration date. Well, my website indeed was designed with such feature. After registration, users will receive a confirmation email on their registration. They should click on a link in the email to activate their account. And we designed the database so that the registration IP and date will be recorded.

However, the dreamhost staff said that not all the fields of IP&date are filled with data, some are blank. Then it must be the problem of our PHP script, not our original purpose, because we designed the database for that.

Now dreamhost disabled my account forever. No response for my emails with questions. No backup for my data that I worked for everyday. I just can't ever believe such a famous hosting provider would act like this. I don't even have a chance to have my data back. I don't even have a chance to correct my PHP script so that the problem will not occur any more.